§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising, such as online advertising for example. In particular, the present invention concerns helping advertisers to effectively target the presentation of their ads.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords advertising system by Google of Mountain View, Calif., delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”) titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”) titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
An “ad network” is an aggregated set of Websites (and/or some other media properties) on which advertisers can place ads by paying a single party. Many ad networks organize their Websites by human created and maintained “verticals” (groups of related products, services, industries, and/or topics that are likely to be found in Website content). For example, “Slashdot.org” is part of the technology vertical /Computers & Technology and “iVillage” is part of the family and home vertical /Lifestyle & Communities/Womens Issues. Advertisers pay to have their ads shown on Websites that are part of these predefined verticals.
Unfortunately, the predefined verticals often only approximate the real need advertisers have in reaching their audience since target audiences might not fit (e.g., may be more granular than, might not be covered by, etc.) a predefined vertical. For example, an advertiser wanting to target student software developers might have to target their ad(s) to all Websites in a “technology” vertical to reach this audience. Thus, in ad networks that aggregate Websites belonging to a vertical or verticals, the vertical or verticals are often too broad for the needs of many advertisers.
Hierarchically arranged verticals may be used to offer narrower or broader targeting options. However, a difficult challenge for ad networks using hierarchical verticals is maintaining the vertical hierarchy. Further, if more Websites are added to a more granular vertical, or if enough advertisers demand a more granular cut of an existing vertical, then the ad targeting system may want to add a new vertical. However, even if such a new vertical is provided, advertisers might not use it. For example, the advertisers might not know of the new vertical, or the human work required to get the more granular targeting might not be worth the effort, etc.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing, present ad networks typically use manually defined vertical “buckets” or “silos” to organize their network of Websites for ad selection. This approach has many inefficiencies. For example, most ad networks only represent a set of Websites which can be organized by human judgment. These inefficiencies are exacerbated when the advertising network handles more advertisers and/or Websites.
In view of the foregoing problems with existing ad networks, it would be useful to allow advertisers to define and/or organize a set of Websites within an advertising network to meet their specific marketing needs without having to rely solely on publisher-defined and inflexible verticals.